Published 2:03 pm, Saturday, September 1, 2012

Take my time working in the Senate, for instance. It was the 1960s and U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana had asked me to stay on as his press secretary when I completed my year as a Congressional fellow of the American Political Science Association.

My new boss was chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Constitutional amendments.

The subcommittee had not been particularly active in recent years -- constitutional amendments are quite rare in our history -- there are just 27 in all.

But because of the assassination of President Kennedy, Sen. Bayh grew concerned about a shortcoming in the Constitution regarding succession to the presidency.

What if JFK had not been killed, but rather severely injured by the assassin's bullets and, though alive, was unable to perform his duties as president?

The problem led to what is now the 25th Amendment to the Constitution covering presidential inability and replacement of the vice president when that office is vacant.

Members of the subcommittee included the Republican minority leader in the Senate, Everett McKinley Dirksen, of Illinois.

Dirksen is considered by most political scientists as perhaps the most successful minority leader in the Senate's history.

He may best be remembered for his ability to work with the Democratic majority to fashion and enact the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He had a warm, professional relationship with Lyndon Johnson when LBJ was the Senate's majority leader, which continued after Johnson succeeded JFK in the White House.

This is how Dirksen described his job:

"The Senate is a public institution; it must work; it's a two-way street; and that requires the efforts of both parties.

One party cannot do it on its own because if the opposition, or minority party, wanted to be completely obstructionist, you could tie up the Senate in a minute, even with a handful of people."

By cajoling, by gentle pressure, by using his remarkable memory and his gift of repartee, the senator took over power in his own painless way.

As he was wont to say, "The oil can is mightier than the sword."

He certainly knew what he was talking about -- and he certainly was a breed apart from what we have today in a Mitch McConnell.

Dirksen, with his wit and mellifluous speaking voice, brings to mind another great Republican -- Robert Ingersoll, who was the most popular, highly regarded public speaker in America in the late 19th century.

Ingersoll's vision of the Republican Party was enunciated in a famous speech he delivered during the 1876 campaign to a military audience in Indianapolis. This is some of what he said:

"I am Republican.

"I will tell you why: this is the only free government in the world.

"The Republican Party made it so.

"The Republican Party took the chains from 4 million people.

"The Republican Party, with the wand of progress, touched the auction block and it became a schoolhouse.

"I am a Republican because that party allows me to be free -- allows me to do my own thinking in my own way.

"I am Republican because it is a party grand enough and splendid enough and sublime enough to invite every human being in favor of liberty and progress to fight shoulder to shoulder for the advancement of mankind.

"I am a Republican, I tell you.

"There is room in the Republican air for every wing; there is room on the Republican sea for every sail.

"Republicanism says to every man: `Let your soul be like an eagle; fly out in the great dome of thought, and question the stars for yourself.' "

That was then. This is now.

Today, there would be no room in the Republican Party for Robert Ingersoll.

There would be no room for Everett McKinley Dirksen.

There would be no room for Ronald Reagan. He wouldn't have taken Grover Norquist's pledge -- Reagan, after all, raised taxes 11 times during his presidency.

There would be no room in the Republican Party for Richard Milhous Nixon. He created the evil, job-killing Environmental Protection Agency.

Now we have a Republican Party with a platform that calls for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and to outlaw abortion even in cases of rape or incest, much less to save the mother's life.

From the party of Lincoln, Robert Ingersoll and Everett McKinley Dirksen, men who spent their lives cutting the chains that held people down and championing freedom of thought and widespread inclusion, this once Grand Old Party has become a mean-spirited, grungy obstructionist crowd that lauds elite plutocrats and punishes poor, striving working people.

It is a party that has subjugated itself to tea party extremists.

As playwright Aaron Sorkin wrote recently, the tea party insists on "ideological purity, views compromise as weakness, denies science, is unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, demonizes education, needs to control womens' bodies, is severely xenophobic, and has a pathological hatred of the United States government."